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The leader of our teachers unions, national and local, appear to live in dread of our states subsidizing choice of school for the low-income parent. These mighty monopolies of the children of our have-not families seem convinced of their own schools’ vulnerability to competition; the liberated mother appears all too likely to execute a quick bail-out for her child.

Here in California, we get to watch the union function in constant paranoia; ever protecting the status quo, it has nourished a rare cordiality with Sacramento, where its influence has kept charter schools very limited in numbers far below the evident parental demand. Family choice threatens their sovereignty over the poor; hence, the charter gets labeled a bad influence, a threat to our otherwise ideal system.

Maybe some charters are, in fact, not so good; their teachers can be sloppy, their facilities second rate, the atmosphere gloomy, and test scores a point or two below average. Just because most of them are popular, who needs such disasters becoming available to all parents?

We all do.

Markets, in due course, can dispose of the inferior few that will always exist; we can happily risk the short-lived, third-rate charter in order to secure the only mechanism – choice – that works to clear the system of failures. Competition among institutions allows customers to decide which school should live. If Happy Hollow Elementary disappoints, mothers and fathers can choose again in hope of getting it right this time.

All of us make mistakes (or so I hear). But these inevitable errors can be part of a valuable learning experience for both parent and child. Mother and father may come to realize that Joey was better off back at his underrated assigned public school. Or, more likely, their empowerment will move them to try a second charter (or private) school, one that appears free of the faults of both schools they have decided to abandon.

Learning from our mistakes can have happy consequences for us humans; in our school domain, there are four such outcomes that seem quite obvious:

·The public school that loses students by parental choice just might awaken to its own failures and mend them, hopefully making itself competitive for the future.

·The child will begin to appreciate the parent as sovereign and caring, hence of family, as a blessing.

·The society will have given its citizens the chance to become responsible actors in the human story.

Unless our civic aim were to maintain our historical regime of servitude, there is no real downside.

The securing of school choice for the impoverished family can take a wide variety of practical legislative forms. The design of state systems that will truly protect that family from discrimination in the private sector and that will do this without threatening the scholastic identity of the school itself is a challenge.

Over the years, Stephen Sugarman and I designed a half-dozen or more diverse models, all aiming to protect the uniqueness of both seller and buyer; none is perfect, but all, I can hope, would be workable and politically prudent. Of course, the form adopted would very likely vary from state to state in their structure.

Reform in pursuit of choice for the poor may, in many states, entail political earthquake in order to become reality. However, that reality excuses none of us from rejecting this nation’s indefensible and degrading treatment of families lacking the resources that the rest of us carefully display in the parental hope to realize the latent capacities and vision of our descendants.

Editor’s note: This commentary from Ashley Berner, deputy director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy and associate professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Education, is the third of a four-part series that examines the importance of high-quality materials for state leaders, schools, and parents.

Family background dictates a hefty portion of students’ academic outcomes (samples from the voluminous literature here, here, and here). It isn’t a shock to find out that kids from well-resourced homes out-score their less advantaged peers on standardized tests and high-school completion rates.

We all hope for schools that nullify the predicted trajectory, that push against the odds and facilitate social mobility. But because these schools are sadly a rarity, the field debates whether we should put our education reform eggs in the school-improvement, charter, and choice baskets, or rather into funding to diminish economic and social disparities.

But two factors lie more firmly within schools’ control: curriculum and school culture. The two previous columns focused on current research and policy with respect to curriculum, with an emphasis on state leadership. I want to focus in this column on why curriculum should matter to private schools, particularly those with a religious framework.

Why should private school leaders take a fearless inventory of their curriculum, with a focus on the knowledge-building it offers and the quality with which it does so? For some leaders, learning that a knowledge-rich curriculum manifestly benefits students is a persuasive reason. They’re all in and want to know if their own school’s curriculum measures up. Others are not convinced, and to them, I offer at least three reasons why the exercise is worth undertaking.

First, they would be joining the most forward-looking and effective district and charter schools, many of which are surging ahead in achievement as a result. Progress is uneven, of course, but many state and district leaders are placing big bets on high-quality curriculum and instruction. Look at Duval County’s implementation of Eureka Math, Core Knowledge Language Arts, and Expeditionary Learning; Baltimore City Public Schools’ adoption of Wit & Wisdom; and Chicago Public Schools’ success with International Baccalaureate.

A knowledge-rich curriculum is a signature of high-performing charter networks, too, from Success Academy and Public Prep in New York, to Great Hearts, IDEA, and BASIS in the South and Southwest. These district and charter school systems offer potentially life-changing educational experiences to some of our nation’s least advantaged children. Even in states with generous private-school scholarship funding, do private schools want to fall behind, perhaps forever?

Second, parents really do care about academic content. It is true that first-generation families care first and foremost about school safety. But that is not the final word.

Patrick J. Wolf, distinguished professor of education policy and 21st Century Endowed Chair in School Choice in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, is the scholar of record on the Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP) in Washington, D.C. – a voucher plan that helps a modest number of families send their children to private schools. His five-year study (here and here) found that what parents wanted for their children changed over time. Initially, they wanted a safe school that their children enjoyed. Over time, however, they came to want more: academic attainment, college preparedness and intellectual depth. Their vocabulary and focus changed. A better environment alone does not suffice.

That parents care about academics comes out in other studies, too, such as a 2018 national survey conducted by Foundations and Donors Interested in Catholic Activities (FADICA). The organization found a link between parents’ perceptions that some Catholic schools did not provide sufficient intellectual heft, and low enrollment rates. And when Education Next’s 2019 nationally representative survey asked, “How much should schools focus on student academic performance versus student social and emotional wellbeing,” parents from all demographic backgrounds gave a resounding preference for academics – in some groups, by a ratio of 2:1.

Finally, and critically for religious schools, a robust worldview and a challenging curriculum need not stand in opposition. This is a point of contention in some religious circles. The debate comes down to whether knowledge that lies outside of a tradition’s sacred text(s) is viewed as part of the sacred order (and therefore good), or outside of it (and therefore damaging).

This is a complex issue. There is substantial variability between and especially within religious traditions. Most religious traditions celebratethe pursuit of the mind and view “reason” as a divine gift (for a small sample of a vast literature, see here, here, here, and here). This becomes a priority that influences these communities’ schools and accrediting bodies. Many religious schools, in other words, take a “high” view of intellectual formation and emphasize a rigorous liberal arts approach.

Other religious groups and their schools do not. As Mark Noll famously put it in 1994, “The scandal of the Evangelical mind is that there is not much of an Evangelical mind.” (He wrote not only as an eminent scholar but also as an Evangelical.) This skepticism can translate into a belief that non-Biblical, non-sacred texts are inherently wicked, or even to an overt rejection of academic success.

As a person of faith and a scholar of educational systems, it pains me to see religious “worldview” as an excuse for academically thin curricula and instruction. Our institute at Johns Hopkins reviews English, social studies, and soon science, materials for their depth and rigor. Among the explicitly religious curricula we have examined are some resources that we find poorly written and shockingly weak on academic content. What will be the consequences for children who graduate from institutions that choose these curricula?

Research suggests that many of them will be helpful contributors to society and law-abiding citizens. But what opportunities will have been foreclosed to them along the way? Which doors will have remained not only closed, but not even perceived? Religious school leaders, I would submit, have an obligation to provide not only spiritual formation but access to beauty, profundity, excellence – alongside the capacity to debate and critique artifacts that are deemed unworthy according to their particular tradition.

Most religious schools in other countries do this as a matter of course. In the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, most provinces of Canada, Indonesia, Israel, Sweden and France (to name a few), governments fund non-state schools generously and hold them accountable for academic results. These pluralistic systems separate schools’ ethos, which vary profoundly, from academic content, which should not. The most significant scholar of educational pluralism, Boston University Wheelock College of Education professor emeritus Charles Glenn, describes how school systems around the world thread the ethos and content needle here.

Of course, curricula are not morally neutral; all information is learned and interpreted through specific lenses, whether explicit or tacit. Some plural systems (the Netherlands is the most obvious example) fund curricular materials that are worldview specific and that also convey content deemed necessary for an educated citizenry.

Unlike many of our democratic peers, the United States will never have a common curriculum at the national or even at the state level. This does not mean, however, that religious schools should de-value intellectual knowledge-building, explicitly or implicitly. There are reasons (including religious reasons) to take knowledge seriously.

Benjamin Franklin Academy in Salt Lake City is an assistance program to homeschooled children with special needs.

Around the country, talk of closures and quarantine is giving way to plans for re-opening. Despite moving in fits and starts, Utah officials found something unique for families and students to look forward to even if schools are closed for the rest of the year.

On Friday, state lawmakers approved a proposal to provide flexible learning scholarships to children with special needs. The Utah account-style scholarships combine the features of what are commonly known as tax-credit scholarships (like Florida’s scholarships for children from low-income families) and education savings accounts, as found in Arizona, Florida, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Tennessee.

Individuals and corporations will receive a dollar-for-dollar tax credit for donations to scholarship account-granting organizations. The scholarship organizations will use the contributions to award accounts to students. Parents can use a scholarship account to find educational therapists that meet a child’s unique needs, buy textbooks, and pay tuition at a private school or for online classes, to name a few possible uses.

Utah’s new scholarship offers families and students multiple private learning options, similar to education savings accounts. By funding the accounts through charitable contributions, Utah officials connected the scholarships with the private choices of businesses and other donors.

In 2016, Jason Bedrick, now policy director at EdChoice, Clint Bolick, former Goldwater Institute vice president and current Arizona Supreme Court Justice, and I described how such an arrangement could work in our research for the Cato Institute. We wrote, “Tax credits simply leave money in the hands of taxpayers who are free to choose which scholarship organizations to support with their own money,” and by adding the savings account component to the scholarships, Utah families can challenge their students or otherwise design a learning experience for a student.

Utah’s scholarship accounts followed a winding path to approval. Gov. Gary Herbert vetoed the proposal near the end of the legislative session, suggesting the scholarships would require new taxpayer spending. State analysts, however, had already reported that every child that leaves a public school to use a scholarship would save the state $1,871. While estimates were not available for existing homeschool or private school students, children with special needs often require expensive interventions no matter their school or learning routine.

With a global financial crisis settling in, lawmakers everywhere should be looking for effective, cost-saving ideas. The scholarships will be worth different amounts based on a family’s income, similar to K-12 private school scholarships available in Indiana. Utah children from families with income levels at or below 185 percent of the federal poverty line will receive scholarships worth approximately $9,000 per year, according to Utah Policy, while students from wealthier families will receive scholarships worth between $5,000 and $7,000, depending on a family’s income.

States around the country need innovation such as this. Before the pandemic, families of children with special needs were already aware of the kinds of products and assistance their children need to be successful and, if possible, learn to be independent. But during the recent shutdowns, meeting the needs of children diagnosed on the autism spectrum or living with Down syndrome presented a challenge to parents and educators. Families using accounts in North Carolina and Arizona have reported that they can continue many services for their children because the accounts are so versatile. Families of these children celebrate when their students make progress and are justifiably fearful those improvements will be lost when normal routines are interrupted.

Utah’s scholarships will be active in January 2021, which gives officials time to sort out some of the features clearly available to children using education savings accounts, such as the ability to save money from one year to the next to prepare for future expenses. Utah policymakers should look to the states with accounts to find answers to common questions about how students can access more than one product or service.

Good ideas like this have a way of breaking through, despite a governor’s veto pen. And this one arrived just in time for Utah families who are ready for life after the pandemic.

Editor’s note: This commentary from Ashley Berner, deputy director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy and associate professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Education, is the second of a four-part series that examines the importance of high-quality materials for state leaders, schools, and parents.

The case for a knowledge-rich curriculum is strong. How can state policymakers make its use the norm? What is even possible in states with firm traditions of local control and extensive choice programs, both of which contribute to variability in content and instruction?

Two (very different) states are role models: Massachusetts and Louisiana.

In 1993, Massachusetts passed a law that required strong curricular frameworks for K-12; established new, rigorous assessments; changed teacher certification to reflect deeper mastery of subject-matter; and specified that professional development focus on subject-matter expertise (see here, here, and here). Over the next two decades, the state became one of the highest-performing educational systems in the world.

More recently, under John White’s leadership, Louisiana made high-quality materials a signature priority (see here,here, and here). In the last few years, membership organizations Council of Chief State School Officers and Chiefs for Change have elevated this work and carried it to other states and districts. See, particularly, Chiefs for Change’s policy memo and the Center for American Progress’s report, on the process.

There are at least four concrete actions that innovative state leaders could take (or have already taken), from least to most extensive, to drive change.

Research on your state can take several forms but is a variation on the theme, “Do you know what your teachers are using?” To answer this question, leaders can support system-wide surveys on teachers’ materials use (as one state we worked with undertook in 2019); offer targeted funds for districts to use for such purposes (as Massachusetts did – see here); and/or develop recommended lists of strong curriculum (see Tennessee as well as Louisiana).

A good survey, such as one based on the RAND Corporation’s national panel, will tell you not only what teachers are using, but why, and for what purposes. District- and state-level findings provide actionable data that let leaders identify exemplars as well as the most pressing needs.

Change procurement.

Most of us yawn when we hear “procurement.” But the protocols by which materials and professional development are selected make a huge difference. Once it had identified high-quality materials with the help of teacher experts, for instance, Louisiana made it easier for districts to purchase them.

State and district regulations on textbook selection vary, of course, but every state can create a policy environment that promotes better choices. As Chiefs for Change wrote last year, “States should provide the knowledge and expertise necessary to help districts and schools select high-quality options without sacrificing the flexibility and autonomy needed to cater to the uniquely local needs of their communities.”

This plays out even in terms of the ideal Request for Proposals (RFP). For guidance about RFPs that incentivize, and those that discourage, high-quality applicants, see here. States could curate model RFPs for district use.

Change teacher preparation.

A third mechanism to promote high-quality curricula is to embed what my colleague David Steiner calls “Curriculum Literacy,” or “the capacity to decide whether a given set of instructional materials is strong or weak,” into teacher prep programs. There are many barriers to doing so, not least that schools of education moved decidedly away from specific content knowledge and towards developmental psychology, more than a hundred years ago.

There thus remains a strong bias in the field against requiring specific knowledge. Nevertheless, preparing teacher candidates to discern the wheat from the chaff would directly benefit the children they end up teaching. For detailed guidance on what it would look like to move the needle, see here.

Design curriculum-specific assessments.

The highest-octane change that state leaders could make would be this: Integrate high-stakes assessments with particular curriculum content that students need to master. This is how summative assessments actually operate in many other countries, with content-specific exit exams in all major subjects, at the end of each grade or grade band. Such an arrangement places meaningful responsibility on students for their own learning (a good thing) and provides clear signals to teachers and parents alike about what instruction should look like.

For a glimpse at how Alberta, Canada, does it, see here. Alberta funds all different kinds of schools, from Catholic, Jewish, and secular, to Inuit and even home schooling, but holds them together through the content knowledge that all students learn and through assessments that ensure that they master it.

An analog in our country would work the other way around, from the curriculum materials that schools actually are using, to tests that reflect that content. One could imagine states having not one but rather several state assessments, each of which draw on high-quality materials being used in the field. Think of a state like Florida, where numerous districts, charter networks, and private schools have begun to use Eureka Math, Agile Minds, or Bridges (in Math) and Wit & Wisdom, Core Language Knowledge Arts, or Guidebooks (in English Language Arts). What if the state allowed schools to choose for-stakes tests that were derived from these curricula, as opposed to only offering one curriculum-agnostic, skills-based state assessment or, for tax-credit-supported private schools, nationally-normed but curriculum-agnostic ones?

A state-approved menu of curriculum-linked assessments would round out the virtuous circle of rich content for students, teachers, and parents. Students would know what was expected of them. Teachers could lean into classroom content without “test-prep breaks” of disaggregated skills. State tests would make more sense to parents, who could draw a straight line from the books their kids are reading. (Some high-quality materials even have parent resources for every unit.)

Even formative assessments could join in, with curriculum-specific tests that guide teachers more precisely, and quickly, instead of providing data that have nothing to do with the daily work of teaching and learning.

Lest one think that this is just pie-in-the-sky, it’s actually happening: Louisiana’s pilot assessment project, for which this institute serves as a partner to the work. This initiative, currently focused on middle school students in districts that opted in, assesses students on the most commonly used English Language Arts curriculum in the state (Guidebooks). The pilot tests the usual ELA skills, of course, but also asks students to think deeply about specific sources they’ve read in class, integrate new but related content thoughtfully, and synthesize ideas that arose across the year in an end-of-grade essay. One of the testing panels also draws on the state’s social studies content, thereby reducing overall testing time.

The Louisiana initiative reinforces the knowledge-build that we know works for teachers and kids, and it could be scaled up elsewhere. Any takers?

Editor’s note: This commentary from Ashley Berner, deputy director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy and associate professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Education, is the first of a four-part series that examines the importance of high-quality materials for state leaders, schools, and parents.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that high-performing school systems around the world require students to master serious academic content (see here, here, here, here, and here).

Studies in our country show the same. The famous “Catholic School Effect” – the phenomenon in which American Catholic high schools in the late 20th century effectively closed the achievement gap between wealthy and low-income students – occurred in large part because they used an intellectually robust curriculum (see here and here).

Or, when Chicago Public Schools put the academically rigorous International Baccalaureate Diploma Program in 13 of its extremely low-performing high schools in 1997, students who went through all four years were 40 percent more likely to attend college than their peers.

Why?

The rigorous four-year program enabled students to develop a “strong academic identity.” And interviews with the program’s graduates indicate that they acquired the academic background and skills to perform with confidence once they entered college.

A knowledge-rich curriculum isn’t just about learning facts. It is about engagement with meaningful information about the world and the questions that human life inevitably raises: geography, history, forms of government, war; foreign languages; how human beings wrestle through perennial questions of meaning and purpose and the good life; how they translate these questions into artistic form; what happens when biological ecosystems interact; how viruses mutate and how we create cures; and so on.

Note that we are not talking about mere skills. We’re talking about an intentional, subject-specific, knowledge build of the kind that leaders as different as Diane Ravitch and E.D. Hirsch have championed (repeatedly, in Hirsch’s case), that Dan Willingham’s empirical work validates, and that characterizes what all students in some countries and elite prep school students in ours, are routinely taught.

Schools and school systems that impart such knowledge make headway against socioeconomic learning gaps, because they give low-income students the background knowledge that better-resourced peers acquire in their homes. Moving to a higher-quality curriculum is also cost-effective; schools have to purchase or design curricula, so they might as well expend resources on strong as opposed to weak materials.

A content-rich curriculum also helps equip young citizens with information about liberal democracy – how it functions, why it matters, and how the American story looks from different perspectives (see here and here). Natalie Wexler’s beautifully-drawn recent book, “The Knowledge Gap,” sums up the growing body of research and provides clear examples of what knowledge-building can look like in actual classrooms.

The good news is that educational leaders in the United States are increasingly aware of the powerful effects of a strong curriculum and of what it takes to sustain its impact. For example, under John White’s leadership and with a team of teachers, the state of Louisiana began to promote the effective use of high-quality materials (see here and here).

Prominent organizations such as Chiefs for Change and the CCSSO are supporting the shift to high-quality curricula among their members (see here and here). EdReports has become a gatekeeper for curricular quality, and organizations such as Student Achievement Partners, TNTP, and Achievement Network are on the front lines to support the move to more challenging materials.

And school systems are taking them up on the offer: the list of charter networks, districts, and (some!) private schools that emphasize high-quality curriculum is growing by the day. To name a few, take a look at IDEA Public Charter Schools, Great Hearts Academies, and Success Academy Charter Schools; Baltimore City Public Schools, Cumberland County Schools (NC), and Duval County Public Schools; the Partnership Schools (New York City); and the Institute for Catholic Liberal Education.

If things are moving in the right direction, why devote more time to the subject?

Because many schools simply haven’t caught up. National studies of America’s classrooms find that most of them under-challenge students, particularly underprivileged students. The RAND Corporation’s national survey on instruction found that the vast majority of teachers cobble together their own lessons from a variety of sources, including from Pinterest, Google, and TeachersPayTeachers.

When our Institute reviews ELA and Social Studies curricula through our Knowledge Map process, we see high- and low-quality sources juxtaposed, and little effort to draw primary and secondary sources together into a coherent whole. A systematic approach to building mastery of any given topic – something my own children experienced in Oxford, England, at a Catholic school that followed the UK’s national curriculum – is, sadly, quite rare.

This is not just a malady of “public schools” or progressive education; many private schools have lost the plot along with their district cousins. I worry that some private schools all too readily accept public funds without a commensurate commitment to the in-depth knowledge-building that enables social mobility and democratic citizenship. I fear that commissioners of education leave tools on the table that could support quality across all schools, whether district, charter, or private.

The “curriculum effect” has implications for state leaders, schools, and parents. What can policymakers do to elevate educational excellence in a heterogeneous culture? How can private schools – particularly faith-based schools that rest upon religious worldviews – thread the needle between distinctiveness and common cause? What specific questions should parents ask schools about their instructional materials?

In coming weeks, this column will contrast the curricular status quo with a vision of what is possible for the next generation of American students. Please stay tuned.

Families will remember March 2020 for how quickly state officials closed schools due to the coronavirus outbreak. If schools want to offer parents and children continuity and stability, educators and policymakers must focus in April on jump-starting instruction while students are at home.

“Some teachers who, as soon as this thing hit, they were good teachers and were already connected with their classes,” Hardy says. “They didn’t have to wait for somebody downtown to tell them to do that.”

Hardy continued: “What happened, though, was that the [Philadelphia] school district stopped them from doing this.”

Hardy, who also serves as school board chair for Ad Prima Charter School, said his school is not waiting for the state to issue instructions; the school plans to distribute laptop computers to students without devices at home.

“When you look at how people have responded, it’s my opinion that the charter schools are really out front in this, right away,” Hardy said.

As adults scramble to help children adapt to changes brought on by the virus, our K-12 students do not need perfection. But they do need parents and teachers alike to try.

In Maryvale, Ariz., west of Phoenix, teachers at Western School of Science and Technology (WSST) made sure students could use school devices at home while schools are closed. Eighty percent of WSST students speak a language other than English in their homes, and 95 percent qualify for free or reduced-priced meals, said school director Peter Boyle.

Prior to the pandemic, WSST students divided their time between online instruction and interactions with their teachers.

“We have a significantly high degree of technology penetration and familiarity that allows for a pretty quick switch to this remote learning plan,” Boyle said.

His teachers developed a system of academic playlists, where students access instruction in small bits – 1- to 2-minute segments in some cases.

“A playlist is a personalized learning plan,” Boyle said. “Each teacher populates a playlist, which has about 200 minutes of content, from the online learning programs or from reading materials that we can push out to students.”

Students can choose the order in which they complete the work. Additionally, the school is building on its existing routine of part-time virtual instruction now that all instruction must be online.

In South Carolina, the Charter Institute at Erskine is encouraging all schools to take a similar approach and learn from existing full-time virtual schools. The school is building a library of web videos using the virtual schools to help brick-and-mortar teachers adjust, said Vamshi Rudrapati, director of the Institute.

Julie Phillips, 2019 Charter Institute teacher of the year, who is a virtual school teacher, said in an interview that the best solution, even for teachers who are not experienced with online instruction, is to help students continue “to master and build existing skills.”

“Look at it week by week,” Phillips said. “Every subject that we want them to work on for Monday, use it as a checklist. Check it off, then go to the next subject.”

Many teachers, especially in charter schools, are trying to reach students during the virus, and state officials should encourage these efforts. The pandemic forced physical separation on family, work, and school communities, but it shouldn’t separate teachers and students from ingenuity.

A few years ago, an eminent author-educator – let us call him or her “X” – renounced a short-lived flirtation with and promotion of school choice. X returned in remorse to a preceding career as supporter of the compulsory assignment of the children of not-so-well-off families to their local common school. Such mothers and fathers, like most parents, value their legal authority over just where, and from whom, their own flesh and blood will learn what’s what; sadly, they can’t afford to exercise it.

Now, X clearly knew this, and was, I think, in that brief defection to school choice, a would-be friend of the poor, yet, like too many of our pedagogical elite, was wedged in an intellectual bunker. That specific dark hole featured, and does yet, a set of empirical assumptions about government schools that picture their world as sufficiently uniform in method and message to serve as the common experience for both rich and poor – for every child.

Hence, justifiably, that same routine may be imposed, in whichever school, upon those families over whom the government holds sufficient economic (not legal) power. These, we see, are the poor who cannot escape by moving residence or by paying tuition at St. Athanasius. At the public school, everybody learns the same stuff anyway, so … no big problem.

This image of an education that is truly “common” may have been comforting to professional minds like that of X who longed to behold and be part of some “one best system.” And, by extension, the news of this reality lulled, and does yet, much of the American public conscience by its appearance as a happy truth coming from those who really know.

The mass of us thus can join X in the sedated apprehension of a school system truly common in its core mission and method. That ruling image quite logically encourages our widespread assurance that any “public” school serves as a proper place to teach successfully those young citizens who can be trusted to maintain our civic ideals (and, especially, that child of the poor whom it rescues from family ignorance).

Prudently, the apologist concedes that, human nature being what it is, this intended civic and intellectual payoff will be not quite universal; it is simply the best that the mind of man can deliver short of Plato’s recommendation that elite society snatch all babies permanently from their parents’ corruptive influence.

Furthermore, this flourishing homogeneity among the product of the common school would be insurance against those forms of civic and social division ever threatened by the disharmony of content method – and even civic purpose – represented in our motley-minded private schools. This image of an ideal and extant order of truly common state schools versus another of incoherence just could have nagged serious minds like that of X even during his/her season of pro-choice.

The would-be altruist was, and remained, in a personal vocation to the poor; but only for that one brief season did he/she suppose that even these have-nots could be trusted to choose from a broad private menu whatever would be best for their own child and society.

Soon, and to X’s dismay, in what now could seem the real world, he/she witnessed a near monopoly of the pro-choice conversation by apostles of a “pure” unregulated market in schooling, made as it had been imagined by the late Milton Friedman. That is, roughly, every child, whether rich or poor, would receive a voucher of equal dollar amount; government would leave the seller (school) free to charge whatever extra it could lure from the buyer (parent). If low-income families found themselves clustered in cheap and chancy private schools, such is life; there were to be no rules that would encourage their admission by the seller.

If in fact it was that cruel image of school choice which drove X (and many another) back to the support of our military-style draft of the poor, that could be understandable. X’s decision would then have been consistent with the popular conception that public schools all at least try to teach the same stuff in the same way. X went for what seemed the lesser of evils; and the poor would thus learn the same as the rich.

For better of worse, that picture of symmetry appears to me untrue, even among schools of the same district – even from room to room in the same school. It was untrue of our own family experience with five children who spent a bit over half their semesters enrolled in public schools. Our story is confirmed today, not only in professional media and tattle but, more directly, in the tales of today’s school parents – some in appreciation of such rich variety, more in disappointment.

Teachers, it would appear, are still free humans with their own world views, personalities and talents; they assign their own students ideas of history and civics quite incompatible with the classroom down the hall. Next year, some will feature the anomalous and discredited 1619 Project, others the profound scholarship of James Loewen’s “Lies My Teacher Told Me.”

This jungle of minds could be taken as the pride rather than the scandal of the “public” school, in part a happy, if paradoxical, effect of their very status as public – a governmental entity. Even our courts have shown concern for the (limited) “right” of the public teacher to speak her own mind. And, much more important, is the intellectual umbrella provided the off-beat instructor (ironically) by the hungry domination of the system by the teachers union which effectively shelters all teacher performance but extreme ideology or factual quackery.

The message of the “public” schoolroom is neither uniform nor predictable. And that would be fine, if only the parent were empowered to choose, experience, switch – to be a parent.

Coronavirus is interrupting life in general and education specifically. As parents in the U.S. adjust to school closures and the potential for their K-12 child’s coursework to continue online, families should come to realize that they will be exposed to more of what their children are learning.

For some, this will be new.

Wall Street Journal editor Serena Ng wrote recently from Hong Kong, where schools have been closed since Feb. 3, that she now can “see every detail of every lesson.” Ng says, “I previously had only a vague idea about what they were learning in school.”

All parents should be able to know what their children are learning, and for those paying attention in the coming weeks, the virus offers a chance for them to do just that. Working parents who juggle jobs and their children’s school activities while managing a home haven’t been neglectful if they don’t know what happened in fourth-period math on a given day (try asking a teenager what happened in class). Some simply have relied on schools to decide on instruction.

School districts are not always so transparent. As Matt Beienburg at the Goldwater Institute explained earlier this year, even if state law allows parents to review their child’s curriculum, they can do so only on school premises; in some cases and in some districts, there are limits set on when parents can see the material. Again, parents are not lazy if they don’t always know what is in their child’s syllabus.

When parents know what is being taught, they can effectively advocate for meaningful change. The reading wars over phonics versus whole language instruction are still with us today, while the Common Core debates over a national curriculum have simmered in time for everyone to scrutinize the New York Times’ 1619 Project.

The Project, a set of essays accompanied by K-12 curricular materials, “aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” Slavery and the racism that followed are a blight on our nation’s past, but the Times has taken the idea too far according to many scholars. Pulitzer Prize-winning historians, leading intellectuals and even the Times’ own fact-checkers have criticized the essays, citing inaccuracies.

For thousands of parents, the initiative is not just a problem for someone else’s school. The Times and the Pulitzer Center have successfully advocated for integrating the material into some of the nation’s largest and most-high profile school systems, including Chicago, Newark, Buffalo and Washington, D.C. In Florida, Florida A&M University highlighted the Project in September 2019 and has hosted events on the topic with Florida State University.

Critically, the Times on March 11 issued a correction to a central premise of the essays, saying that not all colonial revolutionaries fought the British to protect the institution of slavery. If the Times heeds other warnings from experts, this modest correction should not be the last. Meanwhile, the Times already has disseminated the original curricular materials to schools.

Developments like these are among the many reasons why the next few weeks of school closures and online instruction are an important opportunity for parents to catch up on what is happening at their child’s school. When parents send children back to brick-and-mortar schools, they should do so ready to raise questions, prepared with more information.

Parents practicing “social distancing” in the coming weeks should use this period to get closer to their child’s school assignments.